old age

Distinctions

zaken (זקן)

The Mishnah's stage list (Avos 5:24) sets zaken at sixty and seivah at seventy. Rabbi Avraham Bedersi HaPenini (Chosam Tochnis) concludes from this, and from two pesukim in which a man is a zaken before he reaches seivah (Shmuel I 12:2; Yeshayahu 46:4), that seivah is the later stage. Rabbi Yehuda Leib Shapira-Frankfurter (HaRechasim LeVik'ah): zaken belongs to people and animals, not to plants; Iyov 14:8, which calls a plant's root zaken, is a borrowed usage and not the word's primary sense. The Targumim render zaken either kashish or sav.

seivah (שיבה)

Old age at seventy, and by extension white hair. Rabbi Eliezer Reines (Maftechos HaDamesek) reads seivah as a contraction of seva yamim, "satisfied with days," the phrase Rashi and Bartenura attach to seventy in Avos. Aramaic sav (with a samech) is its cousin, and the two stand behind saba, an old man or a grandfather.

yashish (ישיש)

Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) places yashish after seivah on the strength of Iyov 15:11, so yashish marks a more advanced age than seivah; Bedersi suggests it may name the Mishnah's next stage, ninety, "bent over." Radak derives it from yesh: one who has existed a very long time. The word appears only four times in Tanach, all in Iyov (12:12, 15:11, 29:8, 32:6).

kashish (קשיש)

The Aramaic equivalent, the Targum's standing rendering of yashish and one of its two renderings of zaken. Rabbeinu Chananel (Bava Metzia 109b) and Rabbi Nosson of Rome (Sefer HeAruch): Aramaic kash derives from kashish, which carries the same sense as yashish. As for how the two words connect etymologically, the column reports that the only idea it could find is an unlikely one, proposed by Rabbi Mordechai Tzvi Herzka (Divrei Chachamim): that aleph, yud and kuf interchange because in gematria they are the first number of the ones, the tens and the hundreds respectively, so the yud of Hebrew yashish becomes the kuf of Aramaic kashish.

yashan (ישן)

Old of things rather than of persons. Shapira-Frankfurter pairs it against zaken: zaken for people and animals, yashan for plants and produce, and by extension for anything that has sat long enough to be last year's.

atik (עתיק)

Root ayin-tav-kuf, whose primary sense in Tanach is movement in space: Avraham and later Yitzchak move camp (vayaatek, Bereishis 12:8 and 26:22), and a child is atik when "moved away" from nursing (Yeshayahu 28:9). In later usage the root means to copy or transcribe, as though one took the information from one document and moved it to another. Because Hebrew presumes a connection between time and space, atik also names what is far removed in time, hence Daniel's Atik Yomin, Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:9 and 7:22). The column adds a personal aside: he used to think the English antique was a corruption of atik, until Rabbi Shaul Goldman told him that linguists parse it otherwise, as the Proto-Indo-European ant, "front, before," plus okw, "to see."

vatik (ותיק)

A talmid vatik in the Gemara is a veteran or experienced disciple; vatikin are those who rise to daven at the earliest possible time; and Yedid Nefesh, ascribed to Rabbi Elazar Azikri, addresses Hashem as Vatik, which one might connect with His being called Atik. In all these one might be tempted to hear "old," or at least "old-timer." The column offers a more plausible explanation: Rabbi Ernest Klein, in his etymological dictionary, relates vatik to the Arabic wathuqa, "firm, solid," seniority and distinction being what a man earns by acting dependably and reliably. On that account vatik refers to dependability and standing in a particular position, not to an age.

A popular folk etymology connects vatikin to the Vatican, the home of the Papacy and the Holy See, on the grounds that its leaders too claim to be dependable and reliable. Serious linguists reject it, and derive Vatican from the Latin vates, soothsayer or prophet, and cano, to sing or chant, the site having housed a pagan oracle before it became the center of Christianity.

Rendering guidance

• Trap: "old" absorbs zaken, seivah, yashish, yashan, and atik at once. Where a passage counts stages or builds a series, keep them apart: "elder ... old age ... the aged."
• Where זקן and שיבה stand together, render them as an ascent, not as a synonym pair; on Bedersi's reading the second is the later stage.
• Yashan of produce is "aged" or "last year's." Never use it of a person; Shapira-Frankfurter's whole point is that people take zaken.
• Vatik / vatikin: "veteran," "senior," "the punctilious." Writing "the old ones" for vatikin imports an age the word does not carry.
• Atik: "ancient." Reserve it for remoteness in time; where the root is doing spatial work, translate the movement ("moved on," "was weaned").

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "The Old Man and the See," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 25 Cheshvan 5780 (2019-11-23): https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/the-old-man-and-the-see; raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/8487-the-old-man-and-the-see.md. Primary loci cited: Avos 5:24 with Rashi and Bartenura; Shmuel I 12:2; Yeshayahu 46:4 and 28:9; Iyov 12:12, 14:8, 15:11, 29:8, 32:6; Bereishis 12:8 and 26:22; Daniel 7:9-22; Bava Metzia 109b; Radak, Sefer HaShorashim; Bedersi, Chosam Tochnis; HaRechasim LeVik'ah; Maftechos HaDamesek; Sefer HeAruch; Rabbi Ernest Klein's etymological dictionary.

The comparative Arabic and Indo-European etymologies and the Vatican folk etymology had been dropped from an earlier version of this entry under a mistaken sources rule; they are restored above. The Arabic wathuqa is Klein's actual argument, so without it the entry's ruling on vatik rested on nothing, and the Vatican paragraph is what the article's title puns on.

Three claims have been cut from the rendering guidance as not traceable to the article: a citation of Tehillim 71:18 for ziknah v'seivah, which the article never gives; that zaken in a halachic context means elder by authority rather than years; and the yashan/chadash contrast with "stale" for an idea. The clause saying that the roots of vatik and atik are distinct is also cut; the article says only that one might connect them, and does not rule.